The Christmas Princess (9 page)

“Just born as one,” April muttered.

“Princess or no princess, the right hairstyle can make a woman feel more at ease than six months of protocol lessons..”

“No. Too high profile.”

“I do have split ends,” April said. “I should have had a trim last month. It doesn’t have to be fancy…”

“Sure,” Sharon said, with entirely too much good humor. “Take her that little place where you get your hair cut, Hunter. Nobody would ever crack him. And that place would certainly be low profile enough.”

Hunter’s hair was cut at a barbershop, owned and operated by Mack Dubronski, a retired Marine. Sharon was right that Mack would never breathe a word.

A vision of the brawny barber leaning over April, his hands in her sudsy hair, her eyes closed in response to the touch, popped up like an evil hologram.

“Maybe Sharon could trim the ends,” April said.

“You can’t send a woman to meet a king without having her hair done,” Sharon said in the I’m-the-boss voice she used so seldom in the office, unless she was on the phone with her kids.

He pulled out his cell phone as he walked out to the living room. “I’ll make arrangements.”

“What are we doing here?” April asked.

Even after Sharon left and Derek returned, they’d kept her so busy she hadn’t had time to think about tomorrow. At least not much.

She hadn’t questioned where they were going when Hunter escorted her out the hotel’s back door and into the waiting car Derek was driving.

Now they’d pulled into a narrow alley almost before she’d registered they were in the toniest part of Georgetown.

Hunter looked at her like she was dim. “Getting your hair cut, like you asked.”

“But I thought … When you said about making arrangements, I thought it was with the man who cuts your hair.”

He retreated into his I-show-nothing mode. Why?

“This is better,” was all he said, before scanning the area, opening the door, and preceding her. She was starting to get used to that.

He glared into the alley beyond her as he reached back, wrapped one hand around her arm to draw her close behind him. Remembering what Sharon had told her — only a few hours ago? — she clutched both hands around his arm, suddenly afraid for him.

He glanced at her with a flicker of surprise. Then faced forward again, pushing open the door.

She gaped at the name stenciled on the door as she passed it. “Hunter. Etienne’s?
Etienne’s
? Do you know how expensive—?”

He shut the door behind them, still staying between her and the hallway beyond. “He owes me a favor.”

She goggled at him. Which was why Etienne, the favorite of Washington glitteratidom, first saw her with her mouth hanging open.

“Pierce,” he said.

“Summit.”

Etienne had a last name?

They nodded at each other. There wasn’t an ounce of emotion in either man’s voice. They didn’t shake hands. Yet April had the strangest impression of a bond between them.

“Saw Maurice last week. Said to say hello if I saw you,” Etienne said.

Hunter grunted acknowledgment. They looked at each other a moment longer, then Etienne turned and started away.

“This way.” As soon as they’d entered a room at the back of the otherwise empty salon that apparently was his private domain, he focused on April and said, “Walk.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere. I must see how you interact with space. How could I possibly cut your hair without that?”

She walked. “Shake your head. Again.” She obeyed, even when he added “Turn” and “Faster.”

“Color,” he pronounced.

“No.”

She stopped to look at Hunter, surprised the word had come from him.

Etienne glared. “This is my world, Pierce—”

“No, please,” she said. “I don’t want to have to keep up coloring.”

“Walk. Turn,” Etienne said to her, frowning. “More.”

Before she complied she caught his assessing look at Hunter.

“Highlights, then,” he said as if conceding a great deal. “Subtle. By the time they grow out, you will have natural ones from the spring sun.”

“Okay.”

“Walk! Turn!”

She was dizzy when Etienne abruptly clapped his hands, and breathed out, “Ready.”

Dizzy, yes, but not so dizzy that she didn’t catch a peculiar expression skidding across Hunter’s face. She had no time to consider it as Etienne whisked her off for a smock, shampoo and the works, as he said.

To her astonishment, Etienne did everything himself.

To her great relief, Hunter did not accompany them into the station behind the privacy screen.

As much as he knew about her already, she wasn’t prepared for him to see her hair sticking out in packets of foil.

Sharon Johnson was not only a credit to the Department of State’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, she was one wise woman.

April felt like a new and vastly improved person.

Hunter opened the salon’s back door in his usual fashion, looking around before reaching back for her.

She now recognized how he positioned himself so she was protected on one side by the open car door and on the other by his body for the heartbeats before she was inside the car.

As she slid in, a gust of wind caught her hair, and swung it wide, before it rippled against her cheek on the way to falling back in place. She sighed. She would never again get it to look the way Etienne had, but boy, for tonight, it felt great.

Impulsively, she turned to Hunter, who sat next to her while Derek drove.

“Let’s go somewhere, Hunter. Look, right over there — we could go in and have a glass of wine. We can sit in a corner. No one will see us. We can watch the bright lights and have a glass of wine. That’s all.”

“No.”

“One time, Hunter. To pretend…” Pretend what, exactly? She didn’t know. It didn’t matter. His refusal encompassed all possibilities.

“No.”

“Fine.” She turned away. But she couldn’t have been too angry, because she also felt a little zing of pleasure at the way her hair swung in response to her motion.

“You agreed—”

“I know. You’re right. I signed the dotted line, so no glass of wine, no bright lights. Just haul me away.”

She extended both wrists to him in melodramatic pantomime.

His gaze went to her wrists. Slowly he raised his gaze to her face. So slowly, so intently, that her wrists started to bob and knock against each other, and then she felt heat spreading up from her chest.

“I’m sorry, April.”

She dropped her hands to her sides. “No, I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me.”

“You’ve been working hard. People like you want to get out and have fun, meet people. The king might take you places.”

She kept her eyes down. The moisture filling them was inexplicable.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, truthfully.

“You’re wound up. Don’t worry about tomorrow. The idea is to let them see who you really are.”

She blinked away the last of the moisture and looked up. “An interesting statement coming from someone who’s been trying to teach me to be who I’m not.”

“You’re talking about title, rank, position. I’m talking about what’s in here.”

He touched his fingertips to her forehead. They were cold. She knew that for a fact. He wore no gloves and the temperature was dropping fast. She felt the cold at first contact. She was sure she did. Yet heat bloomed from that point across her face.

“And here.” Hunter said, his fingers dropping to her collarbone above her heart. Coat, sweater, blouse, all separated his touch from her skin, yet she felt the heat there, too. At the same time that, in a paradox that no physics could explain, she and Hunter froze.

April moved first, looking past him to where Derek was turning into K Street. Hunter’s hand dropped.

“Well,” she said with would-be lightness, “if they see who I really am, it sure won’t be a princess.”

Hunter said nothing.

Not until they were in the alley behind the hotel, just before he opened the car door to get out and put his body between her and any risks. “Depends on your definition.”

April came out of the bathroom to find the bedroom almost dark. She could have sworn she’d left the light on …

And then she saw that the curtains had been opened. And before the window sat the table from the corner. The flame of a single candle reflected in the window glass and off a metal bucket.

Another step closer and she could see a split of champagne in the bucket, a solitary champagne flute waiting.

She turned slowly, making sure she hadn’t missed anyone in the shadows. He wasn’t there. The door to the living room was firmly closed. No light showed under it. A clear message.

She sat at the table and poured herself a glass of champagne.

She thought of that sensation of an internal defibrillator jolting her heartbeat when their fingers brushed that first day. She thought of the conversations, of the handshaking lessons, the dancing. His face when they entered the homeless shelter.

Movement from beyond the window drew her attention. It was snowing.

Fat, dawdling flakes meandering past the lights of the city, blurring them at the same time they caught their sparkle and magnified it.

Her glass of wine and bright lights.

Something caught in her throat at the same time a smile broke free.

She poured another glass of champagne and toasted the snow flakes.

He heard her come into the room.

Maybe he’d been listening for it.

She walked past the sofa where he was and went to the drawn curtains. She pulled them open slowly.

Facing the window, she said softly enough that it wouldn’t have awakened most people, “If it were rain, we’d all complain, even though it means it’s not all that cold. Worse if it becomes sleet. Miserable, stinging, sloppy. But then it turns even colder, and freezes each drop into an individual crystal, and suddenly it’s … magical.”

She turned from the window, recrossed the room. At the door to the bedroom she paused.

“Thank you, Hunter.” Then she was gone, without ever looking toward him.

April had a vision of a rubber band, stretching tighter and tighter. And the one doing the pulling was Hunter, even as he remained silent and still on one side of her.

He thought she was going to fall flat on her face. He was steeling himself for the fiasco. That had to be where this tension was coming from.

Oh, God, why had she agreed? She had to get out of this. Would they believe her if she said she was sick? That wouldn’t work. Even if they believed her, Hunter would get that duty-at-all-costs expression, and expect her to carry on.

A contagious disease. Malaria? Or—

“Ah!” April jumped from the contact of a hand on her knee.

Her gaze went to Hunter, but he was still sitting stiffly upright, looking out the window.

Sharon. She’d reached over and patted April, offering a physical reassurance she now backed with words. “You’ll do great, April. Don’t worry. You’ll be fantastic. Won’t she, Hunter?”

He turned slowly from the window, which showed the lineup of impressive structures dubbed Embassy Row as they turned off Massachusetts Avenue. “If you follow what we’ve taught you, you’ll be fine.”

Their eyes met, and she knew with abrupt clarity that he was not only the puller, he was also the rubber band. His taut discomfort practically hummed in the air.

But… Did that mean it didn’t have to do with her?

Sharon grimaced. “Please, Hunter, stop gushing. You’ll make a mess in the limo.”

He scowled.

April chuckled, her tension easing.

The limo slid through a gate that opened before it and glided to a stop in a cobbled courtyard. Before her nerves could gather themselves, the door opened. Hunter stepped outside and reached back in to offer his hand.

The woman who opened one side of the imposing double door was what Lois Warrington wanted to be.

Dignified, cool, inscrutable.

“We have an appointment,” Sharon said simply.

“Come in.”

After closing the door, the woman led them down a broad hallway toward the back of the building. April could swear she heard the rustle of taffeta. The woman had that feel of timelessness.

Opening an impressive door into another hallway until, finally, she knocked at a closed door. They all heard the “Enter” in response.

The woman opened the door, then stepped back. Sharon went in first. April hesitated.

She felt a firm warmth at the small of her back and knew it was Hunter’s hand. Not pushing. Simply there.

She stepped forward.

She’d been right to think of this in terms of showtime, because the stage was set.

At the far side of the room sat a massive wood desk before the partially drawn velvet curtains of a bay window. Behind the desk sat the King of Bariavak.

April’s first impression was that he reminded her of the actor Patrick Stewart with hair and a short beard. He was flanked on one side by two middle-aged men in finely tailored suits and on the other side by a man not much older than her.

The woman who’d guided them here closed the door to the hall, skirted around them, and went to stand beside the young man.

“You may approach,” said the king.

That left them what seemed like a football-field worth of oriental carpet to cross. Briefly, April felt Hunter’s hand once more. Then they started the trek, three across, with her in the middle.

At least she didn’t have to make the trip under the king’s scrutiny. He turned to the people on either side of him and addressed them in a language she didn’t recognize. Instructions from his tone, pleasant but firm. One of the middle-aged men started a response, and the king’s tone grew more firm.

The three men moved away from the desk. The woman stood her ground.

“Madame Sabdoka,” the king said. Then he sighed and added something else.

She gave one nod, then followed the three men. From the corner of her eye, April saw that the woman closed the door behind the men, then took a seat on a straight chair near it.